Every spring the Osman Shrine Circus comes to the City of Saint Paul, this is just as true now as it was in 1954 when I was a first-grader at J. J. Hill Elementary School. In those days it was held at the Saint Paul Auditorium.
I was taken by my parents to the circus and while I loved the clowns, I was bored with the acrobats, ambivalent about the lions tigers and bears, and could not watch the aerial acts as I was certain someone would fall. Even today, the circus is just not for me. The circus is not for me for another more important reason; but we'll get to that reason later.
A week or so before the circus came to town, the school would pin notes to our shirts informing our parents that on a certain day children would be excused from class to attend the circus. The parents would have to send a return note requesting the day off. My parents both worked so little Jackie did not get the day off. My developing sense of fairness somehow determined that this was unfair somehow that I was required to be playing in kindergarten while my friends got the day off.
When circus-time came around the following year and the notes went out, my sense of fairness began to scream. On the day all the lucky kids were excused from school, I devised a plan on the run. I told Evelyn, my daycare mother, that we were excused for the day so kids could go to the circus. She bought it! I was home free! I didn't realize it but there were three flaws in my plan: I had to play by myself; all the other kids were either in school or at the circus. I would need a note explaining my absence; there is no way the school would accept a note scrawled on lined paper in uncertain printing by a six-year-old. That flaw did not occur to me until just now, because of the third, and fatal flaw: Evelyn saw the kids coming home from school that afternoon and reported the incident to my mother.
I was in big trouble. It was the last time I played hookey. The last time until I was in Junior High School, but by then we lived in White Bear Lake and it was the sixties and out of my memories of living in Saint Paul as a child.
I'm not sure the idea of playing hookey would have come to me if it weren't for the circus. I blame the circus for my first experience at playing hookey from school.
This year's circus will be held at the State Fair Coliseum April 8 through April 11, 2010.
LoL- worked for a free pass at the Barnum and Baily. At nine as a kid from small town BC, watering elephants, lions and tigers was bigger than anything I had experienced in life. Sadly, it was also the first time I was ripped off. That carny was a mean SOB. Never forgot it! Cried all the way home as I never got to see the circus.
Thanks for the memory Jack.
I’m not so sure I could cut school and go to the circus its not the cutting classes part it’s the clowns, they make me nervous.